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Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman on the set of Synecdoche New York
Thu, 11 Jun 2009
Charlie Kaufman is back! And this time he’s in the director’s chair too, stamping his personality on another surreal tale which could only have emerged from his off-kilter imagination. Synecdoche, New York starts off as the seemingly straightforward story of a theatre director facing a troubled domestic and creative life, but it ends….somewhere else entirely, to say the least. Trevor Johnston traces the steps on a highly individual, utterly Kaufmanesque journey, which, he’s almost surprised to discover, stands as its writer’s most nakedly emotional work to date.
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He is the poet of frustration. A down-on-his-luck puppeteer can only turn his life around by running tourist trips into the mind of a famous actor. A screenwriter gets a plum assignment then sweats over it while his hack sibling blithely does very well for himself. A spurned lover finds himself powerless to stop cherished memories of romance being surgically removed from his brain. Charlie Kaufman is obviously a worrier, but he’s unafraid to put his neuroses on display, while shaping all manner of narrative trickery and bizarre humour around his fears. Synecdoche, New York is cut from a similar cloth, and although its absurdist imagery, time-structure sleight-of-hand and bitter comedy are as Kaufmanesque as ever, the emotional tenor of the piece is much more openly exposed than before, as if he’s trying to confront the most essential issues facing him as an artist and ourselves as human beings.
The green poo is an omen of things to come. Olive, the small daughter of Schenectady-resident theatre director Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his artist partner Adele (Catherine Keener) sees what she’s just deposited in the loo and worries that there’s something wrong with her. Actually, she seems fine - it’s her dad whose body is soon starting to fall apart as he visits a series of clinics and ends up heavily medicated for the rest of the movie. This creates a sense of foreboding, hints at our corporeal frailty in the face of mortality, and introduces the notion of control – or moreover the anxiety we feel about the things in our life that we can’t control.
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche New YorkAs a theatre director Caden’s used to imposing his vision on the text at hand – in this instance a hyper-realist production of Death of a Salesman – but his problem is that he can’t do the same for his home life. His other half, Adele, is too busy working on her own artworks to attend his opening night, seems much more communicative with her friend Maria, and when she does eventually see the play her response is the exact opposite of the approval he’s seeking. She can’t get excited about him restaging someone else’s old play. ‘It’s not you. It’s not anyone. It’s not real,’ she says. Then the killer blow: ‘What are you leaving behind? You act as if you have forever to figure it out…’
The rest of the story is Caden’s attempt at an answer. He wants to do artistic work which will be his legacy, show the real him, the genuine artist he hopes he can be. But what does he need? As ever, it’s the tension between these two story elements which shapes the drama to come.
Domestic paradise lost
As if Adele’s words weren’t stinging enough, she decides to leave Caden behind and only take Olive when she moves to Berlin for her exhibition, which consists of canvasses so tiny they need to be viewed by magnifying glass. Caden is left feeling powerless, and Kaufman continues to remind Caden of the pain this causes him by keeping Adele and Olive present yet just out of reach through the rest of the film. He can’t get hold of Adele on the phone, he’s told that Olive won’t see him, he imagines Olive’s diary as a litany of invective against him, and even when Adele does return to New York years later he ends up posing as her cleaner – though he still doesn’t get to see her, just reads little notes with instructions!
Keener and Hoffman - Synecdoche, New YorkAll of which provides ample motivation to rise to Adele’s challenge and produce the magnum opus which will be his legacy. Thanks to a surprise MacArthur Grant he gets his chance, and is soon constructing a huge set inside a previously disused downtown NYC warehouse, where rehearsals extend over several decades (yes, you did read that right). Does Caden believe that doing acclaimed creative work will bring his wife and child back to him, when all indications are that he’s lost them forever? It seems like a question relevant to any artist, where the urge to create can often seem linked with a desire for sexual/romantic fulfilment. Yet the universal resonance of this issue again harks back to a notion of control with which we can all identify – hoping the one situation he thinks he can shape will somehow turn around the lives of others beyond his beck and call. It’s a God complex, basically….but it all hinges on the assumption that he’ll be able to mould his long-gestating theatre piece to his own design. A wise assumption or not? That’s the plot motor which gives the story momentum.
Serial Triangulation
Not that the work is the be-all and end-all of Caden’s life. His disintegrating relationship with Adele prompts him to contemplate looking elsewhere for love, and feel guilty about doing it. The quest to finish (and indeed find a title for) his magnum opus helps shape what is a fairly linear storyline – even if it does concertina the passing of time – as indeed does Caden’s ongoing search for love, which plays out in tantalising form as a series of constantly reconfiguring romantic triangles. Triangles which seem to place happiness just out of reach, thus spotlighting the thorny issue of control once more, and all the while pressing Caden (and the viewer) to question his choices.
He starts off in a triangle with Adele and Maria, causing feelings of abandonment which make theatre box-office worker Hazel (Samantha Morton) an attractive option.
He succumbs to her seductive wiles, but still feels bad about it even though Adele has been in Berlin for a year without calling him. Yet as the rehearsals for the play begin, leading lady Claire (Michele Williams) provides an easier and more comforting option.
Then again, his true affections seem to lie elsewhere, as he leaves Claire for an ill-fated attempt to rescue Olive from the art community in Berlin. A chance meeting with Hazel some years later reignites his passion for her, but since she’s now married with kids of her own, he goes back to Claire.
Rehearsals continue for years, but gain new momentum when Caden decides he needs to have an actor playing himself, that way he’ll now be able to analyze and understand his own actions. Sammy (Tom Noonan) joins the cast, but feels he can’t represent all of Caden’s personality without ‘a Hazel’ – eventually played by actress Tammy (Emily Watson) – which in turn alienates Claire so much that she leaves the real Caden.
With down-on-her-luck Hazel (the real one) now working as Caden’s assistant, she strikes up a relationship with Sammy, even though he’s supposed to be more interested in Tammy the actress playing her. Tammy in turn offers herself to Caden, but is this fake Hazel just a substitute for the real Hazel? And since the real Hazel is now also sleeping with Sammy, the fake Caden, is he just a substitite for the real Caden? Technically, this might be classed a double triangle, but it serves to move the story on, because…
Sammy commits suicide to demonstrate the truth of his love for Hazel, who feels bad because she was really only using him to try to win Caden back. By this time, Caden is also leading a double-life as Adele’s cleaning lady Ellen, but when Adele dies (and Tammy disappears from the film) the by now aged Caden and Hazel are reunited – and have one night of tender lovemaking before she too expires. Mortality is, as ever, beyond Caden’s control.
Structured by convention
Happiness for Caden always seems to be just out of reach, as the story’s seemingly complex romantic odyssey pretty much plays out Caden’s passion for Hazel as a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl (then she dies) type of scenario. Pretty tradtional screenwriting craft when it comes down to it. The emotional slam of Caden’s reunion with Hazel plus her demise bringing the ‘love’ thread to a conclusion, comes at the same time as the ‘work’ thread resolves because it’s now forty-six years since the start of production and there’s no-one left to man the sets anymore. The culmination of both key plot stands are the catalyst for Caden’s key realisation – does this answer the question ‘what does he need?’ – where he finally muses, to heart-rending effect, ‘All I want is someone to love me, someone to look at me with kindness, for me to be the most special person in the world for just one person’. So his years of trying to create work that will live on after him have actually amounted to a quest for love, something which has proved elusive. Somehow though, love’s elusiveness has enabled him to come to a point of self-knowledge, raw and open, and for Kaufman himself to seem to be exposing his soul to us. That’s the journey.
The limits of control
At heart then, it’s a very emotionally direct piece, using Caden’s romantic and creative travails to draw us into his plight and connect it to our own human failings and frustrations. However, while we never lose sight of the piece’s emotional trajectory, the absurd process of the play’s decades-long production schedule is pushed further forward in the mix for much of the running time. Caden wants the piece to confront death by seeming to hold every aspect of life within its grasp, something which involves a set that’s a mini city in itself where myriad micro-dramas unfold. And, of course, the more he tries to control all this, the more it spirals out of control, creating for the audience a sense of dizzying complexity that makes your head explode. Caden has Sammy playing him so that means a warehouse set within the warehouse set, but for that warehouse set to be accurate there must be another warehouse set inside it, and so on. Kaufman enjoys following deadpan logic to the point of insanity, though not all audiences – to judge by the walk-outs in many screenings – relish that sense of completely losing their bearings. Yet Caden is a man whose compass has gone haywire, and the writing is merely attempting to recreate for the viewer his woozy state of being.
Indeed, the increasing disorientation plays out as an ironic joke at Caden’s expense. Casting Sammy as himself he hopes will bring self-understanding, but this other Caden’s interference in both the creative process and the real Caden’s love life, eventually leads to the latter being sidelined in his own production. Millicent (Diane Wiest), originally cast to play Ellen, Adele’s cleaning lady, in the event proves a more incisive director than Caden, and it’s only when he has relinquished control to her that he experiences his most satisfying creative moments – as he lies in Ellen’s bed and has Millicent voice Ellen’s thoughts to him through an earpiece, he’s seemingly able at last to penetrate the life of another in an emotionally authentic manner. Is this Kaufman’s own reflection on the creative process?
Still, there may indeed be a wider irony at play here, since Caden’s romantic agonies, the play morphing into some unmanoeuvrable juggernaut, and the pain of losing his daughter, all represent the things in his life which torment him because he can't control then. His parents die, his daughter Olive dies, Adele dies, his beloved Hazel dies. Mortality makes a mockery of the artist. Mortality may be the ultimate artist. Yet all these things could be also read as the bitter manifestation of his multiple anxieties, so in a curious way is he perhaps shaping them after all…?
The final realisation after the final realisation
That’s a tantalising notion, one which might seem to offer some crumbs of comfort to Caden as he stands in the ruins of his life at the end of the film. His play is unfinished, he’s crushingly alone. For all his attempts to tame it, life seems to have slipped through his fingers…
And yet…
Prompted by the epiphanic realistion of his own defining need for love, he now has an idea exactly how the play should be done. The final fadeout gives this a comic shading, yet it’s a crucial point. Caden seems to have tried and failed to control his universe, yet the one constant in his life is his unstoppable urge to create. It may not have brought him in any sustained sense the love that he craved, but it’s his way of defying an obstinate universe.
Whether he’s heroic or self-deluded is for the individual viewer to decide, but in this very moment Charlie Kaufman lays bare the artist in all of us.
Hints and tips
Okay, so not everyone’s Charlie Kaufman, but he wouldn’t be able to lay out this extraordinary fresco without being very attentive to the emotional nitty-gritty of his characters, insights which can be transferable. The triangulation aspect of Caden’s romantic agonies is a really fruitful device for putting the protagonist on the spot, since his choices dramatise his underlying moral make-up, while the uncertainties of which way he might turn creates intrigue which makes the viewer want to know what’s coming next.
Another element which really kicks in here is the way the people whom Caden most loves are actually the ones who can hurt him the most. Adele and Hazel prove unsparing of their opinions about Caden, which not only rubs salt in the wounds of his anxieties, but also gives the audience something to think about as well. As viewers we compare and contrast our own views on Caden, a process which helps to draw us further into the drama.
There’s also comic mileage in following logic through to the point where it seems absurd. As soon as Caden has actors playing the people in his life, it creates fevered complications, leading to the brain-bursting moment where Caden is playing Ellen playing Caden playing Ellen. Possibly. This is all very Kaufmanesque, but it’s certainly an encouragement to writers not to limit themselves, to push for something that’s just that bit weirder for being just that bit more logical.
Oh, and a title which explains the film can be a helpful thing. You don’t necessarily even have to explain it within the film. That’s what the web is for. And it encourages people to work it out for themselves. Doesn’t it?
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2009
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.
Our friends at Revolver, who are currently releasing Synecdoche New York in cinemas across the country, have fixed it for one lucky Kaufman fan to have their own little piece of Kaufman heaven if you can answer the following question:
This is the second time that Catherine Keener has worked on a Charlie Kaufman project. What was the first?
Answers on an email by noon on Friday 19 June to general@scriptfactory.co.uk and the first name randomly picked out of the in-box will be the lucky winner of a Synecdoche soundtrack and beautiful small foyer poster, both signed by Charlie Kaufman. Please put Kaufman in your subject line.